No student of war poetry in the 20th century can afford to be without two anthologies by Catherine Reilly, who has died aged 80: Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War (1981), and Chaos of the Night: Women's Poetry and Verse of World War Two (1984).

When the first wave of critical assessment on the subject began, in the 1960s, readers and writers assumed that only the men who had actually been in the trenches in 1914-18 could have anything useful to say. The contrast between dying soldiers and complacent civilians made women appear selfish and trivial.

"You love us when we're heroes, home on leave," Siegfried Sassoon had mocked, while Wilfred Owen had warned, "weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not". There were folk images of women handing out white feathers, or cheating on their men at the front. But it was also understood that women had won the vote in 1918 because of their massive contribution to the war effort.

Yet it would have been obvious to a girl in her teens during the second world war, in the early 1940s, that, this time at least, war involved everyone. Born in Stretford, Lancashire, Reilly won a scholarship to a Roman Catholic grammar school which, in 1939, was evacuated. She left school before she was 16 and spent most of her working life as an employee of Manchester public libraries, becoming assistant borough librarian for Trafford, with responsibility for children's services, in 1974.

In her spare time she researched her first book, English Poetry of the First World War: a Bibliography (1978), which took four years and for which she was awarded a fellowship of the Library Association. Having trawled through vast quantities of newspapers, magazines and slim volumes, she identified 2,225 British people, a quarter of them women, who had published poetry about that war. Obviously most of them were not great, or even good poets, but it was not so obvious why the many collections of first world war verse that were beginning to appear included no women at all.

At the same time the public was becoming deeply interested in women's writing. "In my desire to make such poems available once again," Reilly wrote, "I returned to the slim volumes and the anthologies, searching for a representative collection."

This collection, Scars Upon My Heart, published by Virago, was meticulously documented and had biographical notes, whenever possible, on the 79 women poets she had discovered. They included Vera Brittain , who wrote the line "Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart" in her poem To My Brother, Margaret Postgate Cole, Eleanor Farjeon, Rose Macaulay, Charlotte Mew, May Sinclair, Edith Sitwell and Mary Webb.

Many of the poems were superb. But there were also verses, of no literary value, by women so obscure that all details of their lives have disappeared. She felt it was important that these should not be left out because they helped modern readers to understand the mindset of the generation that endured the great war.

The book became extremely popular. There are witty and angry poems, there are quite amusing descriptions of life with the army in Europe or on the home front, but the emotion which comes over time and time again is grief. These women knew exactly what they were writing about because so many of them had lost a beloved brother or fiance, or nursed horribly wounded young men.

By the time Scars Upon My Heart came out, Reilly was already working on the literature of the war she remembered. At the age of 55, she obtained a place at Merton College, Oxford, to study for an MLitt, and the result was English Poetry of the Second World War (1986), which won the Besterman Medal for Bibliography. Working in the Bodleian Library on a very tight budget, she trawled through thousands of volumes written over a period of 41 years.

Her second anthology, Chaos of the Night (Virago, 1984) - the title comes from Frances Cornford and refers to bombing - is as impressive as her first and, on the whole, more sophisticated. The 87 poets in it wrote about war service, the blitz, the holocaust, and again, of course, bereavement. Among them were Stevie Smith, Naomi Mitchison, Elaine Feinstein and two refugees from Nazi Germany. In her later years - she was diagnosed with cancer in 2001 - she worked on Victorian poetry and produced two more bibliographies, covering the years from 1860 to 1899.

A third, on the early Victorians, was never finished. Her final anthology was Winged Words: Victorian Women's Poetry and Verse (Enitharmon, 1994), which proved that alongside the Brontës, Brownings and Rossettis there were dozens of intelligent minor writers waiting to be discovered. To her librarian's skills she added a sure instinct for picking out good, or at least interesting, poems, and future generations of readers and researchers will be grateful for her hard work.

· Catherine Reilly, bibliographer and anthologist, born April 4 1925; died September 26 2005